# Inbound vs mails.ai Agent Email (slim)

> mails.ai Agent Email scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Inbound's 63.7 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Inbound leads on reliability and agent ergonomics. Both do email inbox. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/inbound-vs-mails-ai.md (~2,150 tokens) · this version ~780 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/inbound-vs-mails-ai.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/inbound-vs-mails-ai
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

mails.ai Agent Email scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Inbound's 63.7 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Inbound leads on reliability and agent ergonomics. Both do email inbox.

- Inbound: B 63.7, rank #300 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/inbound.min.md
- mails.ai Agent Email: B 66.7, rank #231 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/mails-ai.min.md
- Inbound, good for A team that wants agent addresses on its own domain at a low fixed price, with IMAP and SMTP beside the API and an MCP mode that confines an agent to one mailbox. Ahead on Reliability, 83 against 60; Agent ergonomics, 78 against 73. Also Open source.
- mails.ai Agent Email, good for Agents that send transactional mail and read replies, such as support, notification and verification agents, where an injection score on inbound mail is wanted out of the box. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 81 against 74; Security & auth, 76 against 58; Payments & pricing, 30 against 15; Maintenance & community, 80 against 63; Transparency & trust, 64 against 56. Also Runs on your own machine; Free to start without a card.

| Category | Inbound | mails.ai Agent Email |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 83 | 60 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 74 | 81 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 78 | 73 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 58 | 76 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 15 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 63 | 80 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 56 | 64 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Inbound | mails.ai Agent Email |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Exon Enterprise LLC | Mails.ai |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://inbound.new/api/e2` | `https://api.mails.ai/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| Licence | MIT for the platform repository. The TypeScript SDK, `inboundctl` and the MCP server are Apache-2.0 | Proprietary hosted API under the mails.ai terms of service. The MCP server, the TypeScript SDK and the Python SDK in mailsai/mailsai are MIT |
| Tools exposed | 50 | 20 |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| MCP registry | not listed | `ai.mails/agent-email` |
| Last release | 2026-10-06 | 2026-10-04 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-12-03 | 2026-05-14 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-01-01 | 2026-05-14 |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 359 stars, 1.7k npm/wk | 650 npm/wk, 116 PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (2) |